Tag Archives: digital

The hardest part about doing enterprise shopper journey measurement and analytics is data collection. Putting new hardware in the store is no joke – and yet it’s often necessary to get the measurement you want. Still, often isn’t the same as always. Last week I talked about how you can get surprisingly powerful store measurement by taking data from your existing store WiFi and flowing it into our DM1 platform. Store Wifi gives you broad population coverage (no, shoppers don’t have to connect) but it isn’t very accurate positionally. On the other end of the measurement spectrum is geo-locating your mobile app users. It’s another way – and a good one – to get fascinating measurement about how shoppers navigate your store.

Geo-locating your mobile app users is easy and quite inexpensive. It can be done with no additional hardware in the store. It’s very accurate and, by feeding the data to DM1, you can get powerful and detailed analytics on what your mobile app users are doing in-store. When you add geo-location to your Mobile App (it just takes a few lines of code), it sends you a stream of positional data that tells you exactly where a shopper was throughout their in-store journey. Our DM1 platform ingests that stream, aggregates it, and provides you the store analytics to understand paths, funnels, usage, interactions, and much more.

That’s why, when I speak on geo-location analytics, I steal the line from Lenox Financial and describe mobile app geo-location as the biggest no brainer in the history of earth.

There’s only one real drawback to shopper measurement via mobile app and it’s the obvious one – it’s limited to the population of your mobile app users. For most retailers, that’s a small and totally non-random segment of their population.

Before I discuss the implications of that, here’s what you need to know about getting this kind of app-tracking to work and integrating it with Digital Mortar’s platform.

We’re all mobile phone users and we all know that our phones position us. Most of us could barely navigate our home city without Google or Waze or Apple Maps. I remember being in Venice and wondering how ANYONE ever got around there before GPS. It’s like the old D&D game – a maze of twisty passages, all alike. I imagine people just got lost a lot and that was probably part of the fun.

We also know that the built-in outdoor GPS positioning on the phone is pretty accurate but not super-precise. When you use it for walking you can often see just how dislocated that little blue-dot is from where your actually standing. And it can take some real mental work to figure out exactly where you are and when to turn if – as in places like Venice – you’re not navigating long straight blocks.

Indoor wayfinding has its own set of challenges. Indoor spaces by their very nature are more tightly packed so there’s a higher premium on positional accuracy. But indoor spaces are also more challenging from a measurement standpoint because signals are routinely blocked, distorted or mirrored. And, of course, indoor space are often importantly three dimensional. Outdoor mapping doesn’t have to worry about floors – but in buildings, knowing what floor you’re on is fundamental.

Fortunately, your typical smart phone these days has a whole grab bag of sensors that can be used for better indoor wayfinding. Good indoor wayfinding systems take advantage of the whole array of phone sensors – starting with GPS positioning but adding WiFi, BlueTooth signals, radio signals, magnetic fields, the inertial sensor platform and even barometric pressure.

This works pretty well since most environments these days are signal rich. It’s also very easy to improve the performance of indoor way-finding if you find that there are inside areas where positional accuracy isn’t great. In most cases, dropping a beacon or two will solve the problem.

Typically, indoor wayfinding systems work as code libraries. You put their code into your mobile app and make a few simple function calls. From a developer perspective, this type of integration is simple and straightforward. What’s more, unlike say digital analytics tagging where you need to tie measurement messaging tightly to the functionality, the geo-location libraries (at least when used for measurement) function almost as a stand-alone element of your App. So it’s trivial for developers to integrate the code – and it requires minimal design cycles. Compared to adding good digital analytics tagging to your App, it’s a breeze.

With a 3rd Party library in your App, there’s only two other things you need to do. The first is to fingerprint your location – this is essentially a calibration and mapping step where you translate the signals into site location. It’s not hard, but if you really want a turnkey setup, Digital Mortar can do this for you – it takes less than a day and involves no disruption of the site. It doesn’t even have to be done after hours.

The last step is to provision a feed from the 3rd Party Cloud instance (or your own cloud instance if you’re using a non-turnkey library that just sources the data to your servers) to our DM1 platform. Most providers provide a good, event-level feed as part of their core service. So all you have to do is turn it on. It’s not that much harder in the DIY world.

Keep in mind that most geo-location service providers are thinking about messaging, indoor way-finding and other interactive uses for their service – not analytics. So the analytics you’ll get out of the box is mostly non-existent or even less compelling that what you’d get from a WiFi vendor (and, as I mentioned last week, that aint great).

That’s what DM1 is for. Because there is no better source of data for our platform. The beauty of fully-configured mobile app services is that the positional accuracy is terrific. The event stream can be generated at a pre-determined frequency – so we’re not dependent on the somewhat random ping rates that come with other forms of electronic tracking. That means we can capture a full, accurate, and very detailed customer journey.

Even better, the nature of mobile apps is that they can provide a true omni-channel join. So you can take DM1’s CRM-based feed and integrate with your customer digital behavior to create a full journey customer database. Our CRM feed includes the customer id you pass us (usually a hashed identifier), basic visit information (visit time, length, and flags for purchase and interaction), and the time spent in each area of the store. Adding that to your customer record is powerful. And yes, it’s just for your mobile app users. But often, those are your very best customers.

Plus, there are important applications where the biases inherent in a mobile app sample aren’t particularly damaging. If, for example, you want to know how long customers are queuing at cash-wrap it’s perfectly possible to use mobile app data. When they are standing in line, they are there for the same amount of time as everyone else. And how mobile app users shop the store and take advantage of omni-channel experiences is, let’s just say, quite interesting and valuable.

That being said, it’s like any other case where you’re working with a non-random sample. You can’t assume that all your shoppers behave the way your mobile population does – and if you try to make those kinds of extrapolations, you’re going to get it wrong.

That’s why, though a mobile app feed might be the primary customer source you feed into DM1, it’s more likely that you’ll combine a mobile app feed with a full customer feed from iViu, WiFi or camera.

In DM1, we keep each feed as a separate segment. With a little bit of a code tweak to your mobile app, we can also integrate your mobile app data directly with the iViu feed so there’s no double counting. But most times, you’ll work with them as separate populations.

Either way, you get the full power of DM1’s analytics on the mobile app shopper data. Pathing, funnels, store layout, segmentation, etc. etc.:

Finally, this is also one of the best ways to collect and integrate Associate tracking. DM1 provides full Associate measurement functionality allowing you to understand when and where you’re under or over staffed in the store. Adding geo-location to your associate devices is just as easy as it is on the shopper side – and this is something you can do even if you’re not heavily invested in customer-facing mobile apps.

So if you’re suitably excited, the next question ought to be – where do you get this and how much does it cost?

There are tons of options for adding geo-location measurement to your app. The easiest and most fully-baked come from providers like IndoorAtlas and Radar. Hey, even my old digital analytics friends at Adobe and Google do this. The most full-service systems include the code libraries, platforms for fingerprinting, and robust cloud feeds. They make going from App setup to DM1 analytics a walk in the park. There are plenty of DIY alternatives as well – many open-sourced and free.

The full-service platform vendors typically charge you per location based on broad square footage ranges. It’s quite inexpensive – though the out-of-the-box pricing models tend to work better for single, very large locations than for large numbers of mid-sized stores. Most of these companies seem to engage in enterprise pricing – meaning that the price you pay is largely a function of whatever you can negotiate. And if you’d prefer, we can provide developer support integrating an open-source solution into your App. It probably won’t be quite as robust, but if your primary goal is measurement it will more than get the job done.

From the standpoint of integrating with DM1, it’s pretty much out of the box. If we don’t support the feed already, we’ll create the integration as part of getting you setup – no charge. It’s not too hard because the data streams are pretty much identical – identifier, timestamp, x, y coordinates. There really isn’t much else to it.

The measurement costs are trivial compared to what you spend on App development and small compared to what you spend on digital analytics app measurement and analysis. The data is extremely robust and – in a field plagued by bad data – quite accurate. The omni-channel join possibilities are like adding hot fudge sauce to an already delicious sundae. Paired with DM1, you can measure and optimize exactly how this critical and growing customer segment uses the store. You can study how digital and store behaviors interact. And you have an excellent data source for overall store navigation and store usage that you can pair with other data sources or use as is.

Okay…it may not be the biggest no-brainer in the history of earth. But adding geo-location and DM1 analytics to your mobile app is definitely the biggest no-brainer in shopper measurement.

[Here’s more from my ongoing dialogue with transformation expert and friend Scott K Wilder. In the last post, we discussed ways to make an older workforce more digitally savvy. Scott ended that post with this: “Personally, I would rather be HipChatted vs. Slacked. But technology sometimes like religion. You have to find out what people are most comfortable with. At Marketo, it was Slack. At Salesforce, it is Chatter. For me, I prefer to be Skyped!. How about you?”]

GA: I’m a reluctant video user. I was always the kid who liked to sit in the very back of the class hunched down behind somebody who played Right Guard on the football team. That being said, I have some issues with chat too. It’s a very interruptive technology. I know that’s it’s super popular with developers – and I see the point particularly in Agile teams. But I always viewed serious code writing as essentially monastic. That may seem ludicrous, but writing large scale software is a real intellectual undertaking – requiring you to hold hundreds of thousands of lines of code in your head and have at least a general sense of how they fit together and what’s there. I’m not convinced you can do that while you’re regularly dropping in and out of chat sessions (or, for that matter, having meetings every 30 minutes). When I was writing large-scale code I pretty much talked to no one. Of course, a vanishingly tiny percentage of people are writing serious code. But I feel the same way about writing – something I do regularly. When I’m writing a piece I care about, I seriously don’t want to be interrupted. So my question really is about protecting culture – you’ve talked about adoption – and creating a culture of usage. I agree that’s important – in fact it’s a far more common failure point. Life being what it is, though, we also have to worry about too much success (and part of adoption is assuring people that culture won’t change too much – even if it will). So how do you create an etiquette culture around collaborative technologies that protects other types of behavior we value? After all, no company wants the family equivalent of everyone whipping out their iPhones at the dinner table…

SW: Ah, now we are getting into a little psychology and ethnography. For me, there are two ways to approach this (business) issue:

Constantly try to understand the different personalities in your company

Consistently establish and communicate company values throughout the organization

In every organization, there are many personality types. Each responds to new challenges in different ways, especially when it comes to adopting new technologies. Individual or team behaviors can be looked at through a Myers Briggs lens. Or you can examine various personas involved.

Ironically, 80% of companies do market segmentation with personas or some other kind approach, but few take the time to do the same thing when trying to figure out how to work with their own employees. Few companies step back and look at the different ways their own people adopt technology. There is often little conversation about how new processes and technologies diffuse throughout an organization. So what’s my point about all of this psycho mumbo jumbo.

Before you can create a culture around the adoption of a new technology, you need to understand the different personality types in your organization. And it helps if you leverage a topography like Myers Briggs, to help understand how people learn or adopt new technologies.

For example some people might prefer to learn on their own either studying a user manual or watching videos before kicking the tires and testing out a new product. Others might prefer to learn with a mentor or teacher to guide them. And others might want to learn by participating with others. The important thing is to first understand how an individual responds and adapt to new ways of doing business.

After you know the different types of people/personalities you are dealing with, you can begin to focus a culture that fosters the adoption of new technologies while protecting people’s values (or how they want to start using the new technology).

Finally, the challenge is getting these different types of people to function on a day-to-day basis with each other. This will be easier if you have provide a comfortable and safe environment for them to learn at their own speed and in their own way.

Secondly, when creating an etiquette culture around collaborative technologies, it’s important to present them to your employees by showing how they map to your core company values (This assumes you have company values). Atlassian, my current employer, has very strong values which are reviewed every time the company works on a project. Some of them include:

Don’t #@!% the customer: This statement promotes honesty and transparency. The company knows that their Customers are their lifeblood. Without happy customers, they are doomed

Play, as a team: As they say “We spend a huge amount of our time at work. So the more that time doesn’t feel like “work,” the better. We can be serious, without taking ourselves too seriously. We strive to put what’s right for the team first – whether in a meeting room or on a football pitch.”

These are just two of the values. There are others, but each one is used to help keep every employee aligned and heading towards the company’s True North, especially when adopting a new collaborative technology or trying to change behavior across the organization.

Finally, collaboration has no beginning nor end It is a continuous journey that involves multiple parts of your organization.

GA: There’s a lot here to respond to. I’m totally on board with your thoughts around corporate culture and values. Most companies pretend to have values – some actually do. And while I’ve argued in some other cases that you can drive analytics without necessarily having top-down support (though it sure does help), culture building is either hierarchic or anarchic – and anarchic rarely works as a model. That isn’t to say that individual managers can’t create micro-cultures inside a larger organization. They do – and pretty constantly. But those micro-cultures – for good or ill – are always getting worn down and eroded by the broader culture. There’s no place where the impact of senior folks is more pronounced than on setting the tone for this kind of culture building – and, as I’ve argued elsewhere, culture building isn’t done with words. In the beginning was the deed! You can talk “Don’t #@!% the customer” till you’re blue in the face, but the first time an executive makes a decision to the contrary, all that talk will be less than worthless (and I do mean less since it creates negative value in the company). That’s one good reason why it’s important to have values you A) actually care about and B) can reasonably live up to.

I’m less comfortable with tests like Myers-Briggs for employee segmentation. I’ve never been confident that personality tests capture anything real. I know they have a lot of fans (and a lot of fans among people whose opinions I respect) – but I’m unconvinced. Sure, we all see ourselves in the results of these tests. But we see ourselves in our horoscopes too. Self identification isn’t objective verification. But I’ll give you the validity of personality types and still question whether it’s a good tool to help drive cultural adoption (and proper etiquette) around social technologies. I’ll buy that segmentation would bring something to crafting a change management and adoption strategy – but would I use personality types or would I use things like rank, role, and behavior?

Convince me if you can!

Finally, let’s talk technology. I’d love to get your thoughts on what types of collaborative technologies make the biggest difference in an organization. And I’d also like your thoughts on whether that’s even the right question. Do you need to think about a collaborative suite? Will one tool likely die on the vine where a constellation of tools might work? I’ve seen both approaches fail – but that’s never conclusive. We live in a “baseball” world where failure is always the most common outcome.

[Here’s more from my ongoing dialogue with transformation expert and friend Scott K Wilder. In the last post, we discussed the role of Millennials in balancing an older workforce. But I wanted a little more detail on how to get an older workforce more digitally aware…]

SW: I probably forgot this one because I am an older guy, but I’m also someone who thinks it’s every marketer’s responsibility to learn digital technology. Before I directly answer the question, let me give you an example. My son is really into drones and wants me to take him to some national parks so he can fly his drone. Before I make a road trip with him, however, I want to master drones, so I hired a drone coach. After all, I am the one who is ultimately responsible for my son’s safety. Working at as a Digital Marketer or Digital Employee requires the same commitment. The only difference, however, is that companies need to play a bit of the parental role and provide a clear path for their employees to learn about technology.

This can be done by paying for courses (Marketo, my former employer, pays for its employees to take courses at Lynda.com). It can be done by making ‘learning certain technologies’ as required for the job. Instead of saying you learn it or you lose it (your job), position this change as an opportunity to skill up — and that the company is investing in the future (in its best asset, its employees).

Companies also should provide career guidance — either for older employees to find other opportunities within their company or with a company’s partner. Training, career guidance are not only great retention tools, but also build loyalty after an employee moves on.

Companies also need to gently require that digital technologies be used in their everyday business practices. If the older person wants to remain part of the company, they will have to hop on the digital bus. And like the Magic School Bus (a book my kid loves), it will be a journey into unknown — with lots of opportunity to learn, a bit of uncertainty and a fun adventure. You know what. Even outside the office, they will feel as if they are on the Magic School Bus because by learning technology, older folks can have a more enriched life. My son Facetimes and Skypes with his Grandma twice a week.

Why should companies do this? Why should they make this investment? Several reasons, such as older workers tend to be loyal, older workers already know ‘your business’. Companies should also build incentive systems — gamify their career development — so they will be motivated to take on the exciting challenge of improving their skills.

Final note: Being Digital is more than just using the internet and Facebook. Companies should also figure out what digital technologies will help these older workers do their job better. If they need to be on social media, teach them Hootsuite. If they need to manage email programs, teach them Autopilot or Exact Target. If they need to collaborate better, be their guide while they learn Slack or HipChat.

GA: There’s a couple of points that I want to particularly call-out there. One is that company’s aren’t taking full advantage of the explosion in high-quality educational courseware that’s available these days. Sure, lots of folks will do this on their own, but not everyone is sufficiently motivated. I’ve always said my number one guiding principal – and the reason transformation is so hard – is that EVERYONE IS FUNDAMENTALLY LAZY. Giving people real incentives and formal guidance on courseware so that it’s part of an employee’s basic career development is really easy to do and I think pays tremendous dividends. If your company hasn’t curated public courseware for specific career-tracks and incentivized your employees to take advantage, you should be kicking your HR team’s butt (just my humble opinion).

I’m also a huge fan of the idea (as you know) that people have to DO stuff. And I’m glad you brought up the technologies because that’s the next (and last) area I wanted to explore. A lot of the digital technologies are fundamentally collaborative. But that can make adoption critical to their success. I know you’ve been living this problem – how do you get a team (and keep my older, non-digital workers in mind) to adopt tools like Slack?

SW: Gary, why are you always asking me the hard questions? I think you ‘re correct in focusing on ‘the team’ vs. ‘the company’ and trying to mandate day 1 that a whole company start using something like Slack.

They key is to start with one group. Pick a team that seems receptive to taking on new ways of doing things — especially when it comes to digital technology. And within that group, you should also identify a few key digital change agents, early adopters, who are willing to not only try out the new technology, but also be champions for it.

Create a program for these digital champions. It can be rewards focused, but even better, show them how sharing their knowledge and experience will help them learn a new technology even better and make them more marketable. Intuit, where I spent almost a full decade, has a philosophy called “Learn Teach Learn.” The only way to really learn something is to teach it to others (Intuit has a great learning culture!).

Of course, there is another option. You could see if any group in the company is currently using Slack and make them that group ‘your change agents. At Marketo, it was actually the company’s commuters — employees who took a small shuttle bus that looked like one of those vans old age homes use to transport its frail residents – who started using Slack. They let their fellow workers know if they wanted the bus to wait for them or if they wanted the van to turn around and pick up someone they forgot. My group of commuters called our Slack group, The Purple Lobster.

The Slack group was called the Purple Lobster because that’s what we called the van. We picked purple because that was Marketo’s company color. And lobster because it wasn’t the fastest moving vehicle on Highway 101.

And like a lobster slithering in the sand (sorry about pushing the poetic envelop here) slowly, but surely ,other commuting groups started to using Slack. Eventually, product teams started using it And finally, the CTO and his team made the call to not fight the crowd and force the company to use another tool, like Chatter. Instead, CIO convinced his fellow executives to adopt Slack across the company. It was a brilliant ‘if you can’t beat them, then join them’ strategy.

If you identify a group using Slack, challenge them to go completely cold Turkey. See if they are willing to only use Slack only (no email) for a week or so. At Atlassian, I had my hand Slacked when I tried to send an email to someone with a simple question. They recommended I use their Slack like product, Hipchat. And now, I only have 20 emails in my inbox. How many of you have only 20 emails in your corporate email inbox?

If you are not so lucky to find early adopters, you need to find a group of people who are most like to use the new technology. If there are some older folks on the team, pair them up with the younger wipper snappers. Or provide some training.

The key in all this is not to focus on technology. Instead, treat the change to Slack or any other digital technology as a change management exercise. Focus on adoption — education, onboarding and engagement. None of this should be done in a vacuum. You need someone to shepherd the process. Someone who can be a guide, a teacher, a problem solver and yes, a true change agent.

Other considerations include rewarding people for their efforts and successes. Gamify the process! In doing so, make sure to acknowledge people’s efforts for trying. Don’t make the same mistake most schools make and only pass people for knowing the answer. As Carol Dweck, well known motivational researcher, points out, children praised for hard work chose problems that promised increased learning (vs. just getting the right answer). This also applies to adults. Really!

The key here is to alter someone’s mindset. Instead of rewarding (just giving them a bonus) or punishing someone (not promoting them) for adopting a new technology, recognize their effort and hard work. The end result will be they might adopt taking on new challenges and succeeding at them. Even if it means learning and using something like Slack.

Finally good old training is important. It always amazes me how many companies introduce a new technology and offer one time training. Usually during a three hour class. If you are licensing a technology like Slack, see if they can conduct monthly webinars to answer questions (if not, you offer it). Also have videos and Q&As available for your staff.

Personally, I would rather be HipChatted vs. Slacked. But technology sometimes like religion. You have to find out what people are most comfortable with. At Marketo, it was Slack. At Salesforce, it is Chatter. For me, I prefer to be Skyped!. How about you?

I’m going to wrap up this extended series on digital transformation with a back-and-forth dialog with an old friend of mine. I’ve known Scott K. Wilder since the early days of Web Analytics. He’s been an industry leader helping companies build communities, adapt to an increasingly social world, and drive digital transformation. In some of this current work, Scott has been working with companies to adopt collaborative working suites for their customers, partners and employees – which I think is a huge part of internal digital transformation. So I thought a conversation on the pitfalls and challenges might be interesting and useful.

GA: We all see these hype-cycle trends and right now there’s a lot of interest in digital transformation at the enterprise level. I think that’s driven by the fact that most large enterprises have tried pretty seriously for a while now to get better at digital and are frustrated with the results. Do you agree?

SW: Good question.

When you read white papers about the latest trends in the enterprise space, most of them highlight the importance of each company being digital transformed. This usually means leaving a legacy approach or operation and instead leveraging a new approach or business model that embraces technology.

Unfortunately, most companies fail when they undertake this endeavor. Sometimes they fail because just pay lip service to this initiative, never do anything beyond placing the goal of ‘going digital’ on a powerpoint slide they give a company All-Hands (I have witnessed this first hand). And sometimes, they just test out bunch of different programs without thinking through desired outcomes. (They throw a lot of virtual stuff against the internet wall hoping that something sticks).

Undergoing a Digital Transformation means many things to many people. It can imply focusing more on the customer. Or it can mean enabling employees collaborate better together. At the end of the day, however, a company needs to first focus on one simple end state. One change in behavior! Rather than trying to boil the whole ocean at once and try to do implement massive digital transformation across an organization, it’s better to start with a simple project, try to leverage technology to accomplish a desired outcome, learn from the experience and then share the success with other parts of the organization

Start first with a relatively simple goal. And if you really want to change an organization, see if you can get employees volunteer to be your soldiers in arms and then closely work with them to define what digital success looks like. It could be as something getting employees to digitalize their interaction with each other more or leveraging technology to improve a VOC process. Whatever it is. Start with one project.

Here’s one approach. Once the goal is to define, then ask for volunteers to work on figuring out how to achieve the desired outcome. No digital program or initiative is going to be successful without employee buy – in and involvement, so it behooves CEOs to find a bunch of enthusiastic volunteers to figure out the ‘how’ (If you remember you calculus Y = (x)x Senior managers can decide on the Y, and then let their team figure out the X or inputs.

Digital Transformations often fail because:

Executives often decide their company goals and then impose their approach on the employees. Digital Transformation initiatives also fail because CEOs want to change whole culture overnight. Unfortunately, however, they often forget Rome was not built in day. Even though a true Digital Transformation is often a journey, it is also important to start simple. Very simple!

There’s no buy in at the mid-level ranks in the company

There’s no True North or desired goal

There’s too much attention on the technology and not the cultural impact.

I have read articles that tell you true cultural change can only happen if you eliminate political infighting, distribute your decision making, etc. While all of that is important, it will require gutting your organization, laying off a lot of people and hand-picking new hires if you want to change things quickly.

To truly change a culture, however start simple. Pick a goal. Ask for employees to volunteer to work on it (take other work off their plate so they don’t have to work after house). Ask them to to involve leveraging digital technologies. Give the team room to succeed or fail. Most importantly, be their guide along the way.

Once this small team completes their project, celebrate their success in front of others in the company. Have them highlight how they leveraged technology.

Once this group is successful, anoint each team member to be a digital transformation ambassador and have them then move into other groups of the organization and share their learnings, experiences, etc.

GA: I’m a big believer in the idea that to change culture you have to change behavior – that means doing things not talking about them. I like the idea of a targeted approach – huge organizational changes are obviously incredibly risky. That being said, I feel like most of what you’ve talked about could be applied to any kind of transformation project – digital or otherwise. I’m not disagreeing with that, but I’m curious if you agree that digital presents some unique challenges to the large enterprise. And if you do agree, what are those challenges and do they change/drive any aspects of a transformation strategy?

SW: There are definitely challenges in driving any type of transformative change in an enterprise environment. Here’s a list of challenges preventing a smooth adoption of digital technologies or hindering the ability to digitally transform an organization

As they say. It’s hard to teach an old dog new tricks. Companies get stuck in their old ways of doing things. For example, even though companies are testing the waters with Slack and Hipchat, two great collaborative platforms, few have made any progress in being weaned (a bit) off of email. For example, we all complain about email but refuse to reduce how often we use it). Part of the problem is the result is that those individuals, who are tasked with driving change in the organization actually tend to be the biggest resisters to change. The IT department, who I will pick on here, usually are decision makers and keepers of the digital platform budgets do not want to try something new. (Marketing is slowly getting more say here, but most marketing leads don’t understand new technologies). So IT and even Marketing wait as long as possible to make a decision about adopting newer collaborative technologies, such as Slack or Hipchat. And while they are doing an elaborate evaluation process, today’s tech savvy staff often just jumps in and starts using the latest and greatest technologies. They don’t ask for permission first. This was the case at Marketo with Slack. First, a small group of employees starting using it and soon others jumped in. There was resistance at the highest parts of the company. Eventually, IT, however had no choice and how to follow the wisdom of the crowd. Survey Monkey also started out this way. There are other challenges as well. Solution: Companies need do a better job at knowing understanding what tools their teams want to use and why they want to use them. If the troops are using Google Docs, for example, management needs to embrace this and not try and force their way (in this case, the Microsoft Office 365 way) down the throats of their employees. If there are security concerns, figure out a solution.

GA: I’ll just note that in many ways this reflects my discussion of a Reverse Hierarchy of Understanding in organizations

…What else?

SW: Data and Privacy Issues: Companies, rightly so, are always concerned about data leakage, data security and privacy issues. Enterprises, especially the public ones and the ones in important transaction industries like Finance or Health Care, have to be sensitive to how data is shared within an organization. Solution: If an organization wants to adopt a newer technology, management needs to do more research in how other companies adopt newer technology while protecting their company secrets. Few companies develop breakthrough technologies and systems that they are the first to try something new. Probably someone has already created a similar service or implemented a similar technology. They have probably already dealt with similar issues. I am not saying just copy what they did but rather learn from their mistakes. Or what they did well.

An older workforce: A third challenge is that many enterprises attract an older workforce and/or are not sure how to integrate millennials into their organization. As I pointed out in my book, Millennial Leaders, it’s important to embrace a younger workforce and place these individuals on teams where they can help advise key decision makers. Younger employees are more likely to adopt new approaches, new technologies and new ways of doing things. Solution: Bring millennials into digital related conversations sooner than later. While decision making can still be top down, it’s important to give these younger folks a voice.

GA: Okay – I know you have more thoughts on this but I’m going to stop right there because I know you’re an expert on this Millennial stuff and I want to delve into it a bit. But that’s probably a discussion for Post #2…

In my last post I described some of the biggest challenges to a traditional enterprise trying to drive digital transformation. This isn’t just the usual “this stuff is hard” blather – there are real hurdles for the traditional large enterprise trying to do digital well. The pace of change and frictionless competition drive organizations used to winning through “weight of metal” not agility, crazy. The need for customer-centricity penalizes organizations setup in careful siloes. And these very real hurdles are exacerbated by the way digital often creates poor decision-making in otherwise skilled organizations because of what I termed the reverse hierarchy of understanding.

The reverse hierarchy of understanding is a pretty simple concept. Organizations work best when the most senior folks know the most about the business. When, in other words, knowledge and seniority track. For the most part (and despite a penchant for folks lower down in the organization to always think otherwise), I think they do track rather well in most companies. That, at least, has been my fairly consistent experience.

There are, of course, many pockets of specialized knowledge in a large company where knowledge and seniority don’t track. The CFO may not be able to drive TM1. The CTO probably doesn’t know Swift. That’s not a problem. However, when something is both strategic and core to the business, it’s critical that knowledge and seniority track appropriately. If they don’t, then it’s hard for the enterprise to make good decisions. The people who are usually empowered to make decisions aren’t as qualified as they typically are, and the folks who have the specific knowledge probably don’t have either the strategic skills or business understanding to fill-in. And, of course, they probably don’t have the power either.

Digital can create exactly this inversion in the appropriate hierarchy of decision-making in the traditional enterprise, and it does so at many levels in the organization. Digital has become strategic and core far more rapidly than most large organizations can adapt, creating reverse hierarchies of understanding that can cripple efforts to do digital better.

So if you want to transform a traditional business and you know your organization has a reverse hierarchy of understanding (or maybe just a complete lack of understanding at every level), what do you do?

There’s not one answer of course. No magic key to unlocking the secret to digital transformation. And I’ve written plenty of stuff previously on ways to do digital better – all of which still applies. But here are some strategies that I think might help – strategies geared toward tackling the specific problem created by reverse hierarchies of understanding.

Incubation

I’m sensitive to the many draw-backs to incubating digital inside a larger organization. If incubation succeeds, then it creates long-term integration challenges. It potentially retards the growth of digital expertise in the main business and it may even cannibalize what digital knowledge there is in the organization. These are all real negatives. Despite that, I’ve seen incubation work fairly effectively as a strategy. Incubation creates a protected pocket in the organization that can be staffed and setup in a way that creates the desired knowledge hierarchy through most levels. Would I always recommend incubation? Absolutely not. In many organizations, years of at least partial learning and transfusions of outside talent have created enough digital savvy so that incubation is unnecessary and probably undesirable. If digital knowledge in your organization is still nascent and particularly if you have layers of management still skeptical or negative to digital, then incubation is a strategy to consider.

Transfusion

And speaking of talent transfusions, the role of appropriate hiring in effectively transforming the organization can hardly be overstated. The best, simplest and most impactful way to address the reverse hierarchy of understanding is to…fix the problem. And the easiest way to fix the problem is by hiring folks with deep digital understanding at multiple levels of the organization. In some cases, of course, this means hiring someone to run digital. If you’re a traditional enterprise looking to hire a chief digital officer, the natural place to look is to organization’s that are great in digital – especially the companies that dominate the Web and that we all, rightly, admire. I tell my clients that’s a mistake. It’s not that those folks aren’t really good at digital; they are. What they aren’t good at is digital transformation. If you’ve grown up managing digital platforms and marketing for a digital pure-play, chances are you’re going to be massively frustrated trying to change a traditional enterprise. To drive transformation, you have to be a great coach. That isn’t at all the same as being a great player. In fact, not only isn’t it the same, it’s negatively correlated. The best coaches are almost NEVER the best players.

Getting the right person to lead digital isn’t the place where most organizations go wrong though. If you’re committed to digital transformation, you need to look for digital savvy in every hiring decision that is at all related to your digital enterprise. You need digital savvy in HR, in accounting, analytics, in customer, in supply chain, in branding and corporate communication. Etc. Etc. This is the long game, but it’s ultimately the most important game you’ll play in digital transformation – especially when you’re trying to drive transformation outside of massive disruption. In my last post, I mentioned FDR’s many efforts to prepare the U.S. for WWII before there was any political consensus for war. Every leader is constrained by the realities on the ground. Great leaders find ways to at least lay the essential groundwork for transformation BEFORE – not after – disaster strikes. You need to make sure that digital savvy becomes a basic qualifier for a wide range of positions in your organization.

Analytics

Dare I say that analytics has the potential to play a decisive role in solving the reverse hierarchy of understanding? Well, at the very least, it can be a powerful tool. In a normal hierarchy of understanding, seniority comes pre-loaded with better intuitions. Intuitions born of both experience and selection. And those intuitions, naturally, drive to better decisions. It’s darn hard to replace those intuitions, but analytics is a great leveler. A good analyst may not be quite the decision-maker that an experienced expert is – but at the very least a good analyst equipped with relevant data will come much closer to that level of competent decisioning than would otherwise be possible.

Thankfully, this works both ways. Where senior decision-makers can’t rely on their experience and knowledge, they, too, benefit from analytics to close the gap. An executive willing to look at analytics and learn may not be quite in the league of an experienced digital expert, but they can come surprisingly close.

This works all up and down the organization.

So how do you get your team using analytics? I addressed this in depth in a series of posts on building analytic culture. Read this and this. It’s good stuff. But here’s a simple management technique that can help drive your whole team to start using analytics. Every time there’s an argument over something, instead of voicing an opinion, ask for the numbers. If your team is debating whether to deliver Feature X or Feature Y in digital, ask questions like “What do our customers say is more important?” or “Which do high-value customers say they’ll use more?”

Ask questions about what gets used more. About whether people like an experience. About whether people who do something are actually more likely to convert. If you keep asking questions, eventually people are going to start getting used to thinking this way and will start asking (and answering) the questions themselves.

Way back in the early days of Semphonic, I often had junior programmers ask me how to do some coding task. At the time, I was still a pretty solid programmer with years of experience writing commercial software in C++. But since I wasn’t actively programming and my memory tends to be a bit short-term, I almost never just knew the answer. Instead, I’d ask Google. Almost always, I could find some code that solved the problem with only a few minutes’ search. Usually, we’d do this together staring at my screen. Eventually, they got the message and bypassed me by looking for code directly on Google.

That’s a win.

Nowadays, programmers do this automatically. But back in the aughts, I had to teach programmers that the easiest way to solve most coding problems is to find examples on Google. In ten years, looking at digital analytics and voice of customer will be second-nature throughout your organization. But for right now, if you can make your team do the analytics work to answer the types of questions I’ve outlined above, you’ll have dramatically raised the level of digital sophistication in your organization. This isn’t as foreign to most good enterprise leaders as I used to think. Sure, folks at the top of most companies are used to offering their opinions. But they’re also pretty experienced at having to make decisions in areas where they aren’t that expert and they know that asking questions is a powerful tool for pushing people to demonstrate (or arrive at) understanding. The key is knowing the right questions to ask. In digital, that usually means asking customer-focused questions like the one’s I enumerated above.

Consulting

I’m probably too deeply involved in the sausage-making to give good advice on how organizations should use consulting to drive transformation. But here’s a few pointers that I think are worth bearing in mind. Consulting is a tempting way to solve a reverse hierarchy of understanding. You can bring in hired guns to build a digital strategy or drive specific digital initiatives. And if you’re lucky or choose wisely, there’s no reason why consultants can’t provide real benefits – helping speed up digital initiatives and supplement your organizational expertise. I genuinely believe we do this on a pretty consistent basis. Nevertheless, consultants don’t fix the problems created by a reverse hierarchy of understanding; they are, at best, a band aid. Not only is it too expensive to pay consultants to make your decisions on a continuing basis, it just doesn’t work very well. There are so many reasons why it doesn’t work well that I can attempt only a very partial enumeration: outside of a specific project, your consultant’s KPIs are almost never well aligned with your KPIs (we’re measured by how much stuff we sell), it’s difficult to integrate consultants into a chain of command and often damaging if you try too hard to do so, consultants can become a crutch for weaker managers, and consultants rarely understand your business well enough to make detailed tactical decisions.

Don’t get me wrong. Building talent internally takes time and there aren’t many traditional enterprises where I wouldn’t honestly recommend the thoughtful use of consulting services to help drive digital transformation. Just don’t lose sight of the fact that most of the work is always going to be yours.

That last sentence probably rings true across every kind of problem! And while digital transformation is legitimately hard and some of the challenges digital presents ARE different, it’s good to keep in mind that in many respects it is just another problem.

I’ve never believed in one “right” organization, and when it comes to digital transformation there are strong arguments both for and against incubation. I think a decision around incubation ultimately comes down to whether digital needs protection or just expertise. If the former, incubation is probably necessary. If the latter, it may not be. Similarly, we’re all used to the idea that if we need new expertise in an organization we probably have to hire it. But digital introduces two twists. First, the best candidate to lead a digital transformation isn’t necessarily the best digital candidate. Second, real digital transformation doesn’t just come from having a leader or a digital organization. You should bake digital qualifications into hiring at almost every level of your organization. It’s the long game, but it will make a huge difference. And when it comes to leveling the playing field when faced with a reverse hierarchy of knowledge, remember that analytics is your friend. Teaching the organization to use analytics doesn’t require you to be an analytics wizard. It mostly demands that you ask the right questions. Over and over. Finally, and this really is no different in digital transformation than anywhere else, consulting is kind of like a cold medicine – it fixes symptoms but it doesn’t cure the disease. That doesn’t mean I don’t want my bottle of Nyquil handy when I have a cold! It just means I know I won’t wake up all better. The mere fact of a reverse hierarchy of understanding can make over-reliance on consulting a temptation. When you’re used to knowing better than everyone, it’s kind of scary when you don’t. Make sure your digital strategy includes thought about the way to use and not abuse your consulting partners (and no, don’t expect that to come from even the best consultants).

Keep these four lessons in mind, and you’re at least half-way to a real strategy for transformation.

In the last few months I’ve been spending quite a bit of time thinking about the challenges in physical retail – stores. I’m going to be talking much more about that in the months to come, but thinking about the challenges in physical retail and whether and to what extent digital techniques might help, I’ve also had to think about why digital retail has evolved the way it has.

There’s no doubt that digital has disrupted and hurt traditional retail. But it’s a mistake to attribute that solely to advantages inherent in digital. After all, if it was just a matter of digital being superior to B&M, then Borders should have been fine moving online. That didn’t work out so well.

In fact, one of the most interesting aspects of our digital world is how a perfect leveling of the playing field has produced such a strong tendency to natural monopoly. This isn’t just about retail. In most of the key areas of internet – from retail to video streaming to music to search to ride summoning, we’ve seen an extraordinary tendency toward massive consolidation around a single leader.

It’s not exactly what most of us expected. By eliminating most barriers to entry, creating frictionless geographies, and creating technology environments that scale seamlessly to almost any size, the digital world has removed many of the traditional bastions of monopoly. Old-world monopolies used to spring from cases where scale precluded competition. If, for example, you owned the pipes that carried gas to homes or the wires that carried electricity, it was incredibly hard for anyone else to compete.

In today’s world, that kind of ownership has mostly vanished. You could argue that if you own search you own the pipes to the Web. But the analogy doesn’t hold. It doesn’t hold because anybody can create a competing search system at any time and every single internet user can have instant access to it. It doesn’t hold because there are multiple ways to pipe through the internet besides search. And it doesn’t hold because there really are no physical barriers to building or deploying that alternative search system.

So it wouldn’t be unreasonable to expect the digital world to have morphed into a wild west of tiny artisanal companies with meteoric rises, equally sudden collapses, and constant, ubiquitous competition. Mostly, though, that’s not the way it looks at all. It looks as if monopoly, despite the absence of physical barriers, is actually a more powerful tendency in the digital world than the physical world.

It’s not that hard to understand why things have gone this way. Natural monopolies around things like electricity delivery occurred because of the immense friction involved in setting up the delivery system. Economies of scale were absolutely decisive in such situations. But most traditional markets are resilient to natural monopoly because of fundamental facts of the physical world that worked AGAINST too much scale. In the physical world, it makes perfect sense to have gas stations on the opposite side of a street. And it’s quite likely that two such stations can not only co-exist but thrive despite their close proximity. After all, it’s a pain to cross the street when you want to get gas. I may prefer Whole Foods to Safeway or vice versa. But I often go the grocery store that’s closest to me regardless of brand. And when I lived in San Francisco I bought most of my Diet Coke and impulse snacks at the corner store up my block. No, it wasn’t nice and it wasn’t cheap. But it sure was close. I may like Sol Food in San Rafael better than Los Moles, but so do a lot of other people – and I hate standing in line.

The natural friction that the physical world carries in terms of geographic convenience and capacity help ensure that countless niches for delivery exist. Like my old corner store, in the physical world, you can o be worse at everything except location and still thrive.

That doesn’t happen in the digital world.

It turns out – and I guess this should be no surprise – that in a frictionless world, any small advantage can be decisive. A grocery has to be a LOT better than its competitors to get me to drive an extra 10 minutes. But online, the best grocery is always just a few milliseconds away.

It doesn’t have to be a lot better. In fact, the difference can be incredibly tiny. Absent friction, the size of the advantage is no longer that meaningful. The digital world can make even tiny advantages decisive.

So why doesn’t every aspect of the digital world turn into a monopoly?

The answer lies in segmentation. A very small advantage may be decisive in the digital world. But it’s hard to have an advantage to EVERYONE.

In areas like news and entertainment, for example, it’s impossible to produce content that is better for everyone. Age, education, interest, background, geography and countless other factors create an infinity of micro-fractures. Not only is the content itself differentiated, but it’s creation is almost equally fractured. A.O. Scott could no more produce a version of Real Housewives than Andy Cohen could write a NY Times film review.

Content creation turns out to be friction-full in a way that was somewhat obscured by the old limitations in distribution. In fact, it appears that the market for segmented content and the ability of content to create barriers to consolidation is almost limitless. That’s why there’s almost nothing so important to becoming a good digital company than content creation. It’s the best way there is to guard your marketspace.

All this suggests that there are two paths to success in the digital world. One path involves scale and the other segmentation. They aren’t mutually exclusive and the companies that do both well are formidable indeed.

It’s only a little more than a month till the Digital Analytics Hub in Monterey and a chance to talk all things digital – both practical and philosophical. After all, there is no monopoly on great conversation. Looking forward to talking deep analytics, natural monopolies, digital transformation and digital advantage!

At the Digital Analytics Hub in Europe I facilitated a conversation around enterprise digital transformation. We covered a lot of interesting ground, but organizing digital in the enterprise was the most challenging part of that discussion.

It’s a topic you can easily find yourself going around in circles with as people trot out opinions that sound right but sail past each other. That’s especially true since different organizations start (and want to finish) in very different places.

To get around that, I framed the problem in “state-of-nature” terms. If you were starting a digital organization from scratch in an enterprise, how would you organize and staff it?

But before we could answer that question, we had to consider something even more basic.

Should a “digital” organization be separate?

There’s a pretty strong sense these days that walling off digital from the rest of the organization gets things wrong from the outset. Digital should be embedded right into the DNA of the core organization. In a mature organization, there was a pretty broad consensus that digital isn’t a separate function. On the other hand, what if you’re not mature? Can you embed digital directly and grow it right if it’s inside the huge, complex structures that pervade an existing large enterprise? Even strong proponents of the “digital needs to be organic in the organization” point of view seemed to concede that incubation as a separate organization is often necessary to getting digital done and setup right. Of course, taking the incubation strategy is going to leave you with an organizational debt that at some point will have to be paid. The more successful you are and the larger and faster digital grows, the harder it’s going to be to re-integrate digital back into the organization.

I see both sides of this argument (and I’m sure there are more than two sides to be had). I’m just not a big believer in hard-and-fast right answers when it comes to organizational design.

If you have a strong digitally-experienced leader on your executive team and you have solid relationships between marketing and IT, maybe you try to transform digitally within your existing structures. If you’re not that lucky (and that is pretty lucky), maybe incubation with a strategy for integration is the right answer.

Having gotten to the point where most people conceded that incubation might sometimes be necessary, we returned to the “state-of-nature” question and discussed building out an incubated organization. Most people set product teams at the heart of that organization and agreed that these product teams should be organized very much along the lines that I described in my videos on enterprise transformation: agile-based product teams that include IT, creative and analytics people (behavioral, customer and attitudinal) all working together. In this model, there’s no pass-off from design to implementation to measurement to testing. The same teams that built a project optimize it – and there’s analytics at every step of the process.

I believe this is an incredibly powerful model for getting digital products right – and it’s a model that resonated across a pretty wide swath of different organizations – from giant retailers to very modest start-ups.

But it’s far from a complete answer to creating a digital organization.

Suppose you have these great integrated teams for each digital product, how do you handle all the ancillary functions that the large enterprise has developed? Things like finance and HR, for example. Do they need to be re-created inside a digital organization?

My reaction – and it was common – was that such functions probably don’t need to be re-created inside digital. Including these functions in digital doesn’t seem fundamental to getting digital right.

This point-of-view, however, was immediately challenged when it came to HR. The difficulties of digital hiring are well known – and it isn’t just finding resources. Traditional HR approaches to finding people, vetting candidates, compensation, and promotion bands are all problematic in digital. And if you get the people element wrong, everything else is doomed.

So once again, if you’ve got HR folks willing to work with and adapt to the needs of your digital leader, maybe you can leave existing structures intact and keep HR centralized. But HR is the wrong place to wimp out and leave your digital team without the power to execute the way they need to.

Bottom line? If my digital leader really wanted to own their own HR, I’d say yes.

Other functions? I don’t really know. Is it fundamental to digital execution? Does it need to be done differently in digital? Wherever the answer is yes, then it’s going to be a debate about whether it should live inside an incubated digital organization or be an outside service to it.

There’s another challenge that cuts even closer to the bone and lies at the heart of the challenge to the large enterprise. If you have a single digital product (like a pure-play startup might), you don’t have to worry about the relationship between and across teams and functions. But in a larger enterprise – even when it’s incubated – digital is going to require multiple product teams.

How do management lines work across those teams? Are the IT folks across product teams in the Digital IT organization and are they “managed” by Digital IT? Or are they managed by their Product Owner? In one sense, the answer seems obvious. On a day-to-day basis they are managed by their Product Owner. But who owns their career? What’s a career path like? How do Digital IT folks (or analysts) across product teams communicate? Who makes centralized decisions about key technology infrastructure? Who owns the customer?

Every one of these is a deep, important question with real ramifications for how the organization works and how you take a single product model and scale it into something that preserves the magic of the integrated team but adapts to the reality of the large, multi-function enterprise.

It was here, not surprisingly, that one of the participants in our DA Hub conversation trotted out the “dotted line”. Now it happened to be a consultant from a fellow big-4 and I (too glibly, I’m afraid) responded that “dotted lines are what consultants draw when they don’t have a good answer to a problem”.

I both regret and endorse this answer. I regret it because it was far too glib a response to what is, in one sense, probably the right answer. I endorse it because I think it’s true. God knows I’ve drawn these dotted lines before. When we draw a dotted line we essentially leave it up to the organization to organically figure out how it should work in day-to-day practice. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. It’s probably the right answer in a lot of cases. But we shouldn’t kid ourselves that just because it might be the right answer that makes it a good answer. It’s not. It’s a “we’re not the right people at the right time to answer this question” kind of answer. Knowing enough to know you’re not the right people at the right time is a good thing, but it would be a mistake to confuse that with actually having a good answer to the question.

So here’s my best attempt at a non-dotted line organization that integrates Product Teams into a broader structure. It seems clear to me that you need some centralized capabilities within each function. For Digital IT, as an example, these centralized teams provide shared services including enterprise technology selection, key standards and data governance. In analytics, the centralized team will be responsible for the overall customer journey mapping, analytics technology selection and standardization, a centralized analytics warehouse, and standards around implementation and reporting.

How big and inclusive does the centralized team need to be? Thinking there’s one right answer to this question is a kind of disease akin to thinking there’s some right answer to questions like “how large should government be?” There isn’t. I tend to be in the “as small as practical” school when it comes to centralization – both politically and in the enterprise. The best IT, the best creative, the best analytics is done when it’s closest to the business – that means out there in those Product teams. That also means making sure you don’t incent your best people out of the product teams into centralized roles so that they can “advance” and make more money.

It used to drive me crazy to see good teachers promoted to administrative roles in schools. You can’t blame the teachers. When you’ve got a family to feed, a house to buy, a nice to car to own, you’re not going to stay a teacher when your only path to more money and prestige is becoming an assistant principal. But you don’t see the Cleveland Cavaliers promoting Lebron from player to coach. It’s a terrible mistake to confuse rank with value.

I’m a big believer in WIDE salary bands. One great developer is worth an army of offshore programmers and is likely worth more than the person managing them. Don’t force your best people to Peter Principle themselves into jobs they hate or suck at.

So instead of creating progressions from Product teams to central teams, I’d favor aggressive rotational policies. By rotating people into and out of those central teams, you ensure that central teams stay attuned to the needs of the Product teams where work is actually getting done. You also remove the career-path issues that often drive top talent to gravitate toward centralization.

Communications and collaboration is another tricky problem. Collaboration is one of the most under-invested capabilities in the organization and my Product team structure is going to make it harder to do well. For areas like analytics, though, it’s critical. Analysts need to communicate practices and learnings across – not just within – product teams. So I’d favor having at least one role (and maybe more) per area in the central team whose sole function is driving cross-team communication and sharing. This is one of those band-aids you slap on an organizational structure because it doesn’t do something important well. Every organizational structure will have at least a few of these.

In an ideal world, that collaboration function would probably always have at least two resource slots – and one of those slots would be rotated across different teams.

My final structure features highly integrated product teams that blend resources across every function needed to deliver a great digital experience. Those teams don’t dissolve and they don’t pass off products. They own not just the creation of a product, but its ongoing improvement. Almost needless to say, analytics (customer, behavioral and attitudinal) is embedded in that team right from the get-go and drives continuous improvement.

Those teams are supported by centralized groups organized by function (IT, Design, Analytics) that handle key support, integration and standardization tasks. These centralized teams are kept as small as is practical. Rotational policies are enforced so that people experience both centralized and product roles. Salary bands are kept very wide and the organization tries hard not to incent people out of roles at which they excel. Included in the centralized teams are roles designed to foster collaboration and communication between functional areas embedded in the product teams.

Finally, support functions like HR and Finance are mostly kept external. However, where compelling reasons exist to incubate them with digital, they are embedded in the central structure.

I won’t pretend this is the one right answer to digital organizational structure. Not only does it leave countless questions unanswered, but I’m sure it has many problems that make it fatally flawed in at least some organizations.

There are no final answers when it comes to organizational design. Every decision is a trade-off and every decision needs to be placed in the context of your organization history, culture and your specific people. That’s why you can’t get the right answer out of a book or a blog.

But if you’re building an incubated digital organization, I think there’s more right than wrong here. I’ve tried to keep the cop-outs and dotted lines to a minimum and focused on designing a structure that really will enable digital excellence. I don’t say deliver it, because that’s always up to the people. But if your Product Managers can’t deliver good digital experiences with this organization, at least you know it’s their fault.

People have struggled with this (big) data provider model but Factual feels like it’s found a real (and valuable) niche. Would love to see more of this grow since external data is a huge miss in most big data systems.

Targeted VoC is a powerful (and totally neglected) tool for personalization. Facebook’s experience is entirely relevant to ANY content producer. I don’t know if I can take credit for this, but I suggested this to folks at Facebook a couple of years back!

An interesting discussion of the problems in identifying “likely” voters and the benefits of behavioral data integration. Food for thought in the enterprise world as well where the equivalent is often possible but rarely done.